mortality

Your faces are very beautiful,but they are wooden cages.You had better run from me.My words are fire.

[T]he habit of living as if in the shadow of death has remained with me, and I consider that, too, a gift.

It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and on one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn't expect anybody to love me...

Your only real problem is mortality! No religion can solve this problem, but science can do!

I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time.If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking open, my fingers digging into the guts, spilling springs and delicate gearing. But now, there is now use, now way of stopping time.

And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.

A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them__ot one__as a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.

And we went through AIDS... which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.

Be Mindful of Death" (Memento Mori)

There is not love of life without despair about life.

As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.

Death, only death, can break the lasting chain;And here, ev'n then, shall my cold dust remain

A small fact:You are going to die....does this worry you?

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren__ even a memory, you__e only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

Can you hear me? Sighing. You were right. My requiem is well prepared. Still to be written is the poem that is never complete, an endless rubbing on the ink block, an endless dipping of the pen, an endless swoop over the white paper, the poem of my life. I will try to write it down. Soon, no, now, I will try. The first line. I called him Necktie. I will write: He taught me to see with eyes of feeling.

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

Were it not Folly, Spider-like to spinThe Thread of present Life away to win-What? for ourselves, who know not if we shallBreathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!

On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.